The Expanding Boundaries of Black Politics by Anthony Wohl

Author:Anthony Wohl [Wohl, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781351483124
Google: 4tszDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B075CNMWKP
Barnesnoble: B075CNMWKP
Goodreads: 37445587
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Structural Reply

Interviewer: Many of these young men say that the jobs their fathers worked in factories are no longer available. Is that what your research is finding?

Ron Mincy: Absolutely. We have a qualitative chapter in the book based upon interviews with young black men in Detroit, and they talk about the same issues. They want to work; in fact, their vision of a good job is one in which they get dirty, a manufacturing job that offers high wages and good health-care benefits. They think that such evidence of hard work helps them to sustain a certain sense of honor in the community. However, they understand that those kinds of jobs have disappeared from the American landscape. They feel that they can’t obtain jobs paying family sustaining wages today, because they lack education, transportation, and those with criminal records, create additional barriers, which they may never be able to overcome. For these reasons, many of these young men feel that they are left out of the information/service economy in which they now live.

McWhorter picked up on similar points from Alford Young’s book, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (2004): “They often say they will take whatever they can get, but a sentence or two later say that certain wages are wholly unacceptable. This seemingly contradictory talk is consistent with their statements about problems with certain past work experiences, such as the fast food industry, where some men eventually find jobs but abandon them (if not be dismissed) as soon as problems or tensions arise.”

See Young, 2004 and Young (2006).

From insights gathered from Young’s ethnographic work Demetra Nightingale and Elaine Sorensen (2006) determined that well-paying, non-service sector jobs would be attractive to these men. They then determined that a surprisingly high number of these jobs would be available well into the coming decade.

Interviewer: You also say that there are still jobs where we don’t see black men. Why is that?

Ron Mincy: Many of those jobs require lots of customer contact. They require the ability to work in teams. And many of these men have criminal records [which raises employer concerns about: liability; sales; repeat customers; customers at risk and their own safety at risk]. And those who don’t have criminal records are barred from employment because they live in the same neighborhoods as many men who have gone to prison and returned to their communities. Employers don’t do background checks, particularly smaller firms, where less-educated workers often apply for jobs. If you’re a young black male who has no more than a high school diploma, [and live in a certain community where many men have criminal records] employers simply throw your resume in the trash.

This is part of a larger conversation on statistical discrimination. McWhorter accurately and anecdotally characterizes statistical discrimination this way:

A rich array of studies all make it … clear that black men of this demographic often have an edgy demeanor and response to conflict as a “code of the streets.

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